XFS maintainer Darrick Wong characterized the file-system driver changes for Linux 5.12 as " a lot going on this time, which seems about right for this drama-filled year. "

On the feature front for Linux 5.12, this mature file-system has seen work to speed up freezing when read-only workloads are still running, refactoring to the logging code, faster fsync and garbage collection scans, and continued work towards being able to support shrinking XFS file-systems.

Particularly on the

With Fedora 34 aiming to use PipeWire by default for audio use-cases currently handled by PulseAudio and JACK, the Red Hat developers working on PipeWire remain very busy in addressing bugs and wiring up new functionality for this audio and video framework/server.

PipeWire 0.3.22 was released this week with a whole lot of work in trying to see that Fedora 34 this spring can ship with it in use by default. Some of the key PipeWire 0.3.22 highlights include per-

It's been nearly one year to the day since the release of Netrunner 20.01 as this desktop Linux distribution focused on providing a good KDE-based desktop environment and backed by Blue Systems. Today Netrunner 21.01 has been released as the latest step forward for this KDE desktop distribution built atop a Debian base.

Netrunner 21.01 "XOXO" is the new release that is based atop Debian 10.7 "Buster" but switching to the Linux 5.9

When it comes to original, open-source computer games the 0 A.D. real-time strategy game is among the best. The game has been developed as open-source for more than a decade for this ancient warfare themed game. The prior 0 A.D. Alpha 23 release happened back in May 2018 while now it's finally been succeeded by 0 A.D. Alpha 24.

0 A.D. Alpha 24 is out today as the latest major

An exciting new capability with perf in Linux 5.12 is the ability to collect instruction latency metrics as part of the performance reports, but relies on hardware capabilities for now only found in next-generation Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

Linux 5.12 adds the ability to support instruction latency metrics as part of perf report collections. The instruction latency metrics paired with the memory latency data can help developers understand expensive instructions and the time being spent in the different CPU stages. It will be fun when

The Mesa release train once again fell off the tracks for Mesa 21.0 but on Friday the fifth release candidate managed to ship.

Mesa 21.0 is running behind schedule for release and there ended up being two weeks since the prior RC4, but in any case Mesa 21.0-RC5 is now available for testing. Given the extra time between release candidates, Mesa 21.0-RC5 does come on the heavier side. There are also still open blocker bugs left

The issue of having a beginner/easy-to-use focused desktop Linux distribution but not installing new security updates by default without user intervention is that for many users they fall behind in applying often important security fixes.

The Linux Mint blog posted a notice today encouraging its users to install security updates as they are "very important" while the internal statistics indicate significant numbers of users are not doing so. "Apply updates right now!" the notice reads and also warning users to not run end-of-life

Earlier this week saw the release of Plasma 5.21 while KDE developers have been busy working on fixes/improvements to that for the first point release as well as moving forward in other areas like integrating Git support into Kate.

There are a number of prominent crash/bug fixes now pending for KDE Plasma 5.21.1 following the initial rush of users to the new release. Some of the prominent changes to KDE this week include:

- The Kate text editor with Kate 21.04